leave the base. We got one Saturday trip to San Antonio after 6-weeks training. That's the only time I left Lackland for 3-months. There were free outdoor movies or $.25 at the base theater. In spite of that, I remember being so broke I would borrow a nickel to buy a bag of Bugler that came with 20-rolling papers. Smoke that butt down to your finger tips and then field strip it. Failure to do that would get you an extra day of KP.

Ready on the right! shouted the range instructor standing in the center of the firing line and looking to the right down a line of trainees lying in the prone position, carbines pointing downrange at paper bullseye targets. Ready on the left! Ready on the firing line! Commence firing! Twenty M1 carbines popping together made a hell of a clatter. We fired a full clip of eight bullets, one at a time, at targets about 3' wide and 4' high, 100-yards away. When we heard the Cease fire! order it would then be our turn to hoist the targets up their rails while standing in a ditch about 6' deep with a mound of clay behind us. It was always a little scary to hear hundreds of .30 caliber bullets smacking into Texas clay just above your head. We would then lower the targets, mark the hits with black paper circles, raise them to show the trainees where they hit and then raise new targets for the next round.    For a week, we fired carbines, .45 caliber pistols and .45 caliber wire-stock machine guns nicknamed, appropriately "grease guns." I qualified Marksman, same as 9 out of 10 of us. A few qualified Expert. A few didn't qualify. Couldn't hit the ground with their hat. Or didn't want to.    Strangest thing I remember about that cold, bleak part of Texas was the giant earthworms. Don't know their name, but they were 8" to 12" long and as thick as a fat pencil. Their burrows in the hard, red clay were everywhere. On the drill field, the assembly areas, even marching to the mess hall.   KP was a regular thing, one day a week beginning at 4am. Kitchen Police are now paid employees of a food service company hired to feed the troops, and I'm sure they have a nicely sanitized name. Back then the cooks were stumblebum drunks who couldn't make a living outside the military. They were sadistic thugs who would stick a broom between your legs while you carried two buckets of hot water and all of them would laugh to see you sprawled on the floor soaking wet. One recruit broke the handle from the broom and beat the hell out of his tormentor. Wish I had done that, stockade or no.    One day we put on gas masks and marched through a shed containing tear gas. Halfway through we had to remove our masks. One guy in our barracks had been through this and warned us not to shave too close that morning. Tear gas can burn raw skin.

M1 carbine

45 calibre pistol

45 calibre grease gun